One objective of this blog is to encourage productive discussion and debate within the "comments" forum. Leaving comments has been made easier. No registration is required. Comments can be left anonymously. A Hassle free and easy forum to leave a comment. However, any inappropriate comments will be deleted by blog administrators. Thank you for commenting so your voice can be heard.


Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Fu*k Fair And Impartial - Fox Rejects Ad About Its GOP Donation, Admits News Corp Opposes 'Democratic Candidates'

As you may have heard, progressive media watchdog group Media Matters proposed running an ad on Fox News about News Corp's $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association (RGA). 

The idea behind the Media Matters ad was to bring viewers' attention to the political activities of News Corp, which is the Rupert-Murdoch run parent company of Fox News. According to Media Matters, Fox News has devoted just 17 seconds of airtime to the organization's RGA donation, despite extensive coverage by other outlets.

Now Fox and Media Matters are in a war of words over why Fox refused to air the commercial.  However what is undisputed is that News Corp did give $1 Million to Republicans to oppose democratic candidates and Fox news had virtually zero coverage of the donation.

So how is it that Fox can claim any level of impartiality or even-handedness in reporting the news?  It seems they don't really care and are just going to present the news as they see fit.

William Randolph Hearst did that too and helped create "yellow journalism" — sensationalized stories of dubious veracity.  Now Fox creates stories of dubious veracity.

According to Wikpedia:
Hearst's use of yellow journalism techniques in his New York Journal to whip up popular support for U.S. military adventurism in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 was also criticized in Upton Sinclair's 1919 book, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism. According to Sinclair, Hearst's newspaper employees were "willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war." Sinclair also asserted that in the early 20th century Hearst's newspapers lied "remorselessly about radicals," excluded "the word Socialist from their columns" and obeyed "a standing order in all Hearst offices that American Socialism shall never be mentioned favorably." In addition, Sinclair charged that Hearst's "Universal News Bureau" re-wrote the news of the London morning papers in the Hearst office in New York and then fraudulently sent it out to American afternoon newspapers under the by-lines of imaginary names of non-existent "Hearst correspondents" in London, Paris, Venice, Rome, Berlin, etc.
I would swear it was Fox news of which they were speaking.  More hegemonic ideology by media giants.

1 comment: